Plurk This: Second Life Plurkers Among Microblogging System's Most Active User Groups

All my Plurk connections are (mostly) Second Life avatars

I finally have official confirmation of something I've suspected for months: the second life of Second Life is pretty much Plurk, the conversational microblogging system.  I've had an account since last July, invited by one of the many SLers who use it as a kind of asynchronous version of Second Life, so they can keep in touch with SL friends without having to launch the resource-heavy viewer.  Plurk users with SL avatars in their account profile continue friending me, and I've since come to rely on it to understand Second Life's community almost as much as being in the world itself.  Especially after SL Resident Moggs Oceanlane eloquently beseeched Plurk's management to add "Second Life" as a national origin choice in the Plurk profile.  "We decided to make Second Life a selectable country because our users requested it," Plurk's Alvin Woon tells me by email. "As you probably already know, we have a sizable Second Life audience here on Plurk."

How sizable? I asked Woon for a numerical estimate.

"We have thousands of the users who have listed SL as their country," he answered. "They are one of our most active user group. I don't think I ever seen a SL user with karma less than 60, to be honest!" (Plurk measures user participation in terms "Karma" points.) That's an incredible level of engagement, especially compared to other Web 2.0 systems that SLers rely on, to extend and preserve their experience.  Though it boasts some 200 million active users, for example, the largest Facebook group associated with Second Life (helpfully dubbed "Second Life") counts under 5000 members.

This reliance, it's worth noting, goes both ways. Along with the non-US market, Woon says, "most of our growth [is] coming from SL users."

Comments

[Shelly Toonie]

Just another step in taking over the world :D

[Opensource Obscure]

I'm tempted to try using Plurk, but I don't want to stop using Twitter right now, and I think I don't have enough time to be active on both of them separately.

Is there a way to relay your Plurk activity to Twitter or viceversa? (uhm - maybe I could do that by using Friendfeed...)
Can you be reasonably active on both services? How? Do any tools that make it easier exist?

Any advice from users that are on both Plurk and Twitter?

[Tateru Nino]

Yes, Plurk will feed to twitter for you. They end up working a bit differently to each-other though in terms of conversations and philosophy(and I'm pretty sure that microblogging isn't the right word for either of them).

[Valiant Westland]

When I was first introduced to Plurk, I was skeptical of both its design and usefulness. Then, I started to seeing people posting information about cool events and places in SL that I would otherwise never have known about and I was hooked.

I now depend on Plurk as well as a few select blogs like this one, to keep my finger on the pulse of SL. Unlike blogs though, Plurk provides access to this information in virtually (pun intended) "real-time!"

For those who are looking for the best way to keep multiple social networking sites, including Twitter and Plurk updated, I encourage you to check out either http://ping.fm or http://hellotxt.com. Both of these services allow you to update most/all of your social networking accounts from one place. I myself use HelloTxt.com and updating a total of thirteen different accounts with it.

If Plurk sounds interesting to you, drop by my Plurk Timeline and introduce yourself! http://plurk.com/VWestland/invite

[Crap Mariner]

Twitter vs. Plurk... hrm... each has its merits.

Plurk's threads make it more conversational while Twitter kludges that with @ and # hash tags.

Got a note from my pal SecondLie asking why Plurk hasn't been jumped yet for using Second Life without the registered trademark symbol like all the bloggers were.

-ls/cm

[Echelon]

Does anyone know if there's been any attempt to make a universal aggregator application that could pull all of these disparate status feeds into a single conversation timeline? Seems like a natural evolution of the system to me.

[Doubledown Tandino]

We need to encourage SL users on Plurk to have active conversations and interesting things to say. Having a social network site of mostly SL avatars all saying "hi plurk, got my coffee" is pretty pointless.

[Toxic Menges]

I use Twitter for work, so it's the interface I am most comfy with (in fact a lot of my SL contacts are also on my work Twitter), I also use Plurk, but even with two monitors, I can't keep up with both, and stay in SL. I tend to browse more in plurk, and am more active in Twitter. I still find more info in Twitter than in Plurk. Add to that the fact that Tweetie makes things easy for me in terms of Twitter - is there a good mac app for Plurk?

I have to say the timeline on Plurk made me squee as only an online community bod can squee when I first saw it .. it's a beautiful and logical take on the message board.

[Opensource Obscure]

What Doubledown Tandino said. I'm looking forward to interesting conversations on Plurk. I created an account [oobscure] some time ago but I never used it - today, after reading this article I added a bunch of 'friends' and now I'm going to have fun. I'm active on Twitter and I find lots of smart people there, but it's inherently difficult to follow long conversations. Plurk and Friendfeed have threads and reading and participating in threaded conversations is easy and efficient.

If you're on Friendfeed or are inclined to join, don't forget there's a Second Life group: www.friendfeed.com/secondlife

You can post text messages, photos and videos there. Right now, it also aggregates articles from the SL official blog and grid status - feel free to comment! By the way, I like how I can manage both contents I create and sources I read by using Friendfeed. Often Second Life residents have many 'feeds': personal blogs, Twitter, Plurk, Flickr, Youtube, Delicious... when you join Friendfeed, you 'add' these services - then when I'll follow you on Friendfeed I will see all new contents you publish on those services. You have great control on what you actually see on Friendfeed, though, so you can avoid to get overwhelmed. I can choose to hide your Flickr photo only, if I'm not interested in them, and I will still read your blog, Twitter, etc. - or I can hide your Plurk messages in Friendfeed, because I'm already reading them on plurk.com

[Marianne McCann]

I use both, an prefer Twitter. Most of my Twitter time is in my FL name, while plurk is SL. It's gets confusing at times. :-D

[Trilby]

I tried Plurk and eventually abandoned it. I'm an active Twitter user in my first life, and Plurk for my avatar was fun, but it never rose above a certain level -- as Doubledown said, most of it was pretty pointless. The key difference, I think, is that Plurk encourages conversation -- ANY conversation, even if it's "I am now awake." followed by a "YAY" or ":D" from a totally random person. Twitter, though it certainly accommodates inane patter, has a distance built into the interface that discourages that flood of interaction. I think the average user is less likely to tweet just an emoticon, etc. For this reason, I prefer Twitter -- it allows me to cut through a lot of the chatter and get right to the good stuff.

Plurk can also be a lonely place. None of my SL friends use Plurk yet so I started following several of my favorite bloggers. What I got was a timeline brimming with drama and snark, which didn't interest me at all. I think Plurk only works if you have people there to yakk with (and yakk is a deliberate word choice).

[Moggs Oceanlane]

I tend to use Twitter for work (RL) and Plurk more for SL. I find Plurk is the quickest way to find out what events and activities are going on in SL and what issues are affecting the users.

There is a bit of 'hello worlding' that goes on but I do find a lot of really useful information there as well and that is what makes it worthwhile.

Some of the chatter you see is simply people keeping in touch outside of SL so while it may seem inane and pointless it sometimes has a purpose (not always, sometimes :P).

I have been much more involved in the SL community and have many many excellent people in world that I would have never met had I not joined plurk just because I know what is on and when.

It's also a great way to draw attention to JIRA support issues and general SL issues and concerns.

[Sarra Foggarty]

Interesting post. I just did an article about a week ago on the same subject. I personally Plurk and Twitter more than I go inworld anymore because well it doesn't eat up all of my system resources.

[Sylvie Grizot]

@Echelon - I believe most of these systems can output as RSS, so I think any RSS aggregator could pull together chronological status feeds for you, e.g. Google Reader.

However, pulling things together into a timeline - probably not. The timeline is one of the things I like about Plurk (the other being the conversations) compared to Twitter.